It’s been almost a year — 356 days, to be precise — since a magnitude 9.0 earthquake rocked Japan and unleashed one of the most frightening crises of the 21st century. The earthquake and resulting tsunami were devastating enough, but when the wave struck the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the catastrophe took on inhuman proportions.
Inhuman is perhaps the only adequate word to describe the scale on which nuclear power, indeed nuclear technology as a whole, operates. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, famously reacted to the first nuclear test by quoting the Bhagavad-Gita: “…now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Even when the power of the atom was directed towards peaceful purposes, behind it lurked scales that mocked human comprehension. A year after the initial meltdown, workers at the plant still frequently work shifts as short as two minutes before radiation alarms force them to leave. Meanwhile, removing the melted fuel from the damaged reactors can’t even begin for another decade. Our expectations of time — the length of the working day, the speed of recovery — crumble under the power of nuclear energy. Even fifty years after a nuclear disaster in the Ural Mountains, the former site of a nuclear reactor is heavily radioactive.
In his essay About a Mountain, John D’Agata brilliantly depicts the mind-boggling implications of nuclear technology. The mountain alluded to in the title is Yucca Mountain, site of a proposed nuclear waste storage facility and a hotly-debated political issue for the people of Nevada. D’Agata notes that, according to some estimates, the nuclear waste stored in the mountain will need 10,000 years to decontaminate. In a brilliant reductio ad absurdum, he then attempts to grapple with this number. How, for instance, can we ensure that the mountain will remain undisturbed many centuries hence? Languages change, and even the oldest forms of written communication are scarcely 5,000 years old. In attempting to design a sign that will warn posterity, D’Agata reveals the true terror of nuclear technology — the mockery it makes of our powers to order the world around us.
Ten thousand years — a hundred centuries. Even the most pessimistic prognosticators doubt that a full recovery for Fukushima will take anywhere near that long. Yet when dealing with nuclear power, such incomprehensible lengths become part of the everyday calculus.
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